Randomly selected client quote
We love it... it looks really good on our mac
Lisa Silver, The Tin Shop, 7 May 2004
Update: This page probably needs to be updated, see my blog and here too.
The people who visit your website will make or break your Internet venture. Before I trained in the technical side of the Internet, I ran my own marketing company. Now I seem to be coming full circle. Now that the Internet has matured and those who want a website have got one, the competition for those crucial top places in the search engines (Google for instance) is very tight. Think about it for a second .. if you're trying to sell log cabins on the Internet and you want a top ten place in the search engines for that term, you've got to be one of the top ten log cabin marketers in the world to be able to reasonably expect that position.
To be one of the top ten Internet marketers in your field takes time, work, and knowledge. There are perhaps four main ways you can drive traffic to your site.
Your ranking in the search engines is crucial. Most of your prospects won't search much beyond the first page of search engine results. You have to be on that page, and you can't buy your way in. The only long-term strategy to get to the top is to develop the best website you possibly can.
The first task is to work out which key phrases your prospects will enter into a search engine. If someone enters "log cabin" into a search engine, that search engine, knowing the content of all the websites on the web, makes a calculation of which sites would be most relevant to that query, and lists the first ten to the user. That calculation is based on two things, i) the number of times your web page mentions "log cabin" and where on the page those mentions occur, and ii) the number of quality sites that link to your page.
We must, then, ensure that the most important key phrases are placed strategically around your website. Which are your most important key phrases? To answer that, we have to go right back to basics.
Before we can identify your key phrases, we'll need to discuss the basics of your marketing strategy. The five Ps might be a start. Look at your business from the point of view of product, price, promotion, place and data processing. That might cover the bases, but there's more work to do to define your target market segments and to work out what you want people to do when they come to your site .. what will be your call to action, and what paths (possibly a different one for each target market) would you like people to take through your site in order for them to take your hoped-for action. This, incidentally, relates to something called persuasive architecture where the structure of a website leads the user to behave in certain ways. So, search engine optimisation starts right at the very beginning of website development, right on day one when you're deciding what you want.
It's not a linear path. Keyword analysis informs your marketing strategy. Starting from your marketing basics and using a thesaurus, creative thinking, a checklist of ways to think about your marketing, your competitor's sites, and various online tools, I'll spend a day or more creating a list of possible key phrases and assessing them for i) popularity, ii) how many web sites already serve the phrase, and iii) relevance to your business. If we sell log cabins from Norway and we discover that, for instance, "log cabins" is very competitive, but "Norwegian log cabins" has lots of demand but relatively few websites supplying that demand, you may opt to brand yourself as the premier Norwegian log cabin supplier, and if you do, your marketing strategy will change and we'll need to check your key phrases again in case any other ideas have popped up.
Hang on, I hear you say, a whole day on keyword analysis? Easily. It's worth it. Let me give you an example. I just spent an afternoon working on the myKitchen site's keywords. Previously we'd been targeting three main phrases: kitchen cabinets, kitchen cabinets online, and discount kitchen cabinets. The traffic through Overture to those three phrases is 3,790 prospects per month. Having spent, and I'm nowhere near finished, nearly four hours working on keyword analysis I've found thirteen key phrases that address 90% of the relevant traffic and that answer to 150,000 Overture search queries per month. We now have the potential today to reach forty times the audience we reached yesterday. That's why keyword analysis is so important, worthwhile and central to search engine optimisation.
Having done all that, we can take a range of top scoring key phrases and work out how to include them in your website. Part of that task is writing persuasive copy. Fortunately, I have enough work that I don't have to practice what I preach, so don't take this page or site as an example (one look at my blog and you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm trying to do the opposite). Anyway, suffice to say that the text of your website is crucial to your rankings and crucial to the way your users behave, central to your success in other words. Luckily, I write excellent copy.
The basics are boring but effective: what I mean is, don't be dazzled by complicated schemes that guarantee success. I recently made one quick change to a new client's existing website that caused the page title to contain the product name and very short description, something I'd do as a matter of course in any website I developed. His traffic increased from about 1,750 unique visitors per month (which is where it had been for more than two years) to about 9,000 per month thereafter. No other changes were made, so it's clear one caused the other.
Submitting to the search engines is probably not even necessary. If there's a link to your site, they'll find you. The key human-indexed directories are important though The Open Directory Project, Yahoo and maybe Zeal will require a hand-crafted submission.
Having done that, what's the best way to get people to link to you? The best way I know is the simplest. Build a great website and people will link to you. Free of charge. Without effort. So, forget about actively building links, spend that time on developing the best possible website and the links will come.
Once the main work is done, there will be a small amount of ongoing monitoring. We shouldn't need to react to every drop or surge in search engine popularity, but things do change and your search engine position should be monitored. I tend to check monthly and summarise your position in a single number so you can tell at a glance whether traffic from search engines has risen or fallen this month. I have been finding that after a year or so it's worth re-evaluating your keyphrase list.
Google and Overture (among others) offer pay per click advertising systems.
I'm working through the Google Advertising Professional training so that's the system I know best, so that's the one I'll talk about here.
Google's system is called Adwords and it allows you to buy four-line text ads that appear either on the Google search results (at the top, or in a right hand column), or on co-operating websites.
You link your ads to keywords, and when someone enters those or similar keywords into Google, your ad may appear. Similarly, if someone with a website containing your keywords has opted to display Google Adsense ads, your ad may appear to visitors to that site.
You pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. You decide how much you want to pay, and the system suggests a suitable price depending on demand. If you wish to pay a price significantly lower than your competitors, you get a lower placement or simply don't appear. If you bid higher, you'll most likely appear as the top link.
The beauty of the system is its controllability. You get to set your daily budget, the price you pay per click, your keywords, and your ad content. You can run ads for as little as £1 a day, and you can stop and start when you like. That also means you can start an ad campaign now that will be bringing you business within minutes. Search engine optimisation takes a lot longer than that, so pay per click advertising is often used in the early stages to fill in while the search engines discover and index you.
It's not quite as simple as that, though. If you're paying a reasonable amount for people to come to your site, sooner or later you're going to want to see what you got for your money. Adwords gives you a report telling you how many clicks you received, but what happened to those visitors? Did they take one look and turn away, or did they explore and buy?
The first tool used is a landing page. This may or may not be the same as your home page, but it's where the user who clicks the ad is taken. The only way to that page is through the ad, so we know anyone who arrives there has come from the ad, directly or perhaps indirectly (passing the link to a friend, or revisiting). This leads to the possibility of making ads that appeal to different market sectors, and having a landing page that also appeals to them, effectively making your website more personal, and more persuasive.
Thereafter, using the information in the server log files (every action on a website is saved in a server log file), we can analyse the routes people took through your site. We can answer, for instance, questions such as "how long do users spend on this page, on average", "which page is the most common 'leaving page'", "what path do most people take through our website", and so on. We can check whether people are following our predefined paths or meandering in their own way.
Anyone involved in marketing will know the power of testing. Using this, we can test button positions, text, page designs and navigation structures ad infinitum, constantly making our website more effective. It still amazes me how useful a usability test can be. If, for instance, we can double the number of people who sign up for our newsletter, we've just doubled the effectiveness of our advertising.
Pay per click advertising requires, then, a continuous financial commitment, not just to pay for the clicks, but also to keep testing and improving the ads and the website.
I mentioned links above, but they are important enough to have their own section here. A link to your website improves your chances of getting a high position in a search engine results page. Not all links are created equal, however.
Firstly, the clickable text used for the link is taken into account by the search engines when they assess your page ranking. So, if another site creates a link like log cabins, that phrase, "log cabins", adds to the total number of mentions of "log cabins" in your site. It may improve your ranking, as the search engines will think, reasonably enough, that if a human has linked to your site that way, it obviously has something to do with log cabins.
Before you go off asking all your friends to link to you, it's not that simple. The search engines place great emphasis on the quality of the sites that link to you. If Yahoo put a link to your site on their main page, the result would blow your socks off. If a hundred of your friends did, it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference, unless you have well placed friends. It follows that link farming and similar schemes are basically nonsense.
So, how do you get the good sites to link to you? Besides using traditional marketing and sales techniques to build brand awareness and harvest the benefits, there's only one way, and that's to build a noteworthy site.
For me, what makes a site noteworthy is that it does something useful. Websites are very much like cash machines. People visit, they get what they want, and they leave. If they do that, fine, that's how it should be. If they don't, they're dissatisfied. If they discover something additional they didn't know they could do, or if they find the site exceptionally easy to use, they'll recommend you, they may even link to you or blog about you.
For example, I've a pet idea that I'd really like to implement with an art gallery. I want to make it possible for a client to register their room colours, and for the gallery to suggest colour-matching artworks. I know it's probably sacrilegious, but I'll bet it would be popular, and people would link to it. To create a function like that would require a fair bit of programming, and an in-depth understanding of images and colour. My first class degree in Internet Computing gives me that capability. Combine it with my understanding of marketing and my desire and ability to think differently, and you have in me an engine of creativity that can take your site from the ordinary to the sublime.
Isn't that a better way to drive traffic to your site?
The marketing consultancy I used to run for over ten years started out, and was mainly, a press relations company specialising in high-tech, industrial, and business to business clients. Our knowledge of the media both in the UK and internationally was our strength, and we used to issue perhaps a couple of press releases a day.
If your website is noteworthy, and if we want important websites to link to us voluntarily, surely it would help if editors were aware of your website and were provided with the information with which to write a story. The resulting editorial could appear in print, and in the online versions of magazines, and if the latter, there would be a link to your website. The awareness that generates would result in increased traffic and potentially even more links and recommendations.
If you haven't already got a relationship with a PR company, I am more than capable of writing and issuing a press release to publicise your website, and of watching for forthcoming editorial features so we can submit longer articles. If you have a PR company, then we should brief them on what we are doing so they can take full advantage.
In generating traffic to your website, the first and most important thing is to know your market. From that flows the design of your website and your marketing. A website can be built to capture traffic from popular search phrases and to offer an attractive and easy path for users to get what they want. Do that, and you'll wake up smiling every morning.
Make your website stand out by developing useful but unusual functionality that will appeal to your audience. People will link to you for free, and the press will have something to talk about. Those links will buoy your search engine position and make people come back time and again.
Test and hone your website using pay per click advertising and usability testing. Embark on an evolutionary development path to make your website as smooth and persuasive as can be.
Do those things and your website will take you wherever you want to go.